Capital by John Lanchester: review

Keith Miller applauds John Lanchester’s 'Capital', a brainy
state-of-the-nation novel set on a single street in South London.

5

John Lanchester, at home. Photocredit: Hanna Radley Bennett.

By Keith Miller

5:15PM GMT 23 Feb 2012

The first thing to say about John Lanchester is that a sizeable number of concerned economic illiterates have him and none other to thank for whatever portion of their sanity they managed to hang on to when the banking system went south in the late 2000s. His journalism in the London Review of Books and elsewhere and his book Whoops! explained roughly what was going on in terms that even a humanities graduate could understand (I remember one riff about a London cabbie and a Scottish banknote, though I’m still a bit hazy on what a collateralised debt obligation is). Lanchester’s was an intelligent, humorous and eminently reasonable voice among all the gibbering. If there’s a knighthood going spare by any chance, he should get it nem con.

Capital attempts an allegorical portrait of the Smoke during those turbulent times. Squeezing a bafflingly diverse city of more than seven million inhabitants into even quite a thick book without letting a good portion of the diversity slide is a tall order: to pluck a few examples out of the air, there are no Brazilians, intellectuals, charity muggers, public-sector employees, gangsters, media workers or entertainers in these pages. But the book is a more or less unimpeachably plausible portrait of one (fictional) street in Clapham, a popular south London “village” where a spacious but fairly hideous Victorian house can command a price approaching a hundred times the UK’s median annual income.

The denizens of this none too mean street include Roger Yount, a nice-but-dim investment banker (in truth, neither especially dim nor especially nice) and his ghastly wife, Arabella; a newsagent, Ahmed Kamal, and Rohinka, his delicious one; a Senegalese footballing prodigy; and the octogenarian Petunia Howe, the only aboriginal resident, contemplating death in the house where she was born.

The richer inhabitants attract the professional attentions of, variously, a lawyer, a Polish builder, a squadron of childcare providers and a Zimbabwean traffic warden (Quentina Mkfesi, BSc, MSc – in some ways the most beguiling character in the book, if only because traffic wardens are almost as hated as investment bankers; which makes you wonder why Lanchester didn’t complete the triumvirate and find a role for a journalist). They also have the normal human appurtenances in the way of families, friends, colleagues, lovers etc.

From the outset, there is trouble in Paradise. A scene-setting prologue seems at first sight like a rip-off of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, but soon takes a subtly darker turn, rendering the houses in the street as old gods from an H P Lovecraft story, sucking the life out of generations of Londoners, throbbing with malign intent, gravid with cash and somehow just about now ready to squelch into life. Then we zoom abruptly down to the humans within. It is almost Christmas 2007. The banker’s bonus is scrotum-tighteningly small. His wife is plotting a solo mini-break. A diffident hate campaign against the residents is under way.

Related Articles

Gently and slowly, Lanchester tightens the screws, alternating hope and despair, flitting between protagonists neatly and dexterously. New characters are introduced: a successful, terrible street artist (all street artists are terrible, though not all, significantly, are successful) called Smitty, the newsagent’s brothers Usman and the hapless jihadi-turned-web designer Shahid. Someone at the bank is making trades on colleagues’ accounts, and is “building up a position”. (Don’t you love that phrase? As it happens, I built up a position at Ladbrokes last weekend; but where’s my bail-out, eh?)

There is a reticence, an austerity – to use a modish term – about the book that I very much liked. The obvious-seeming parallels with Dickens should not be inked in too heavily. Like Dickens, Lanchester makes some of his names work pretty hard (Shahid means “martyr”; “Smitty”, “Quentina Mkfesi” and “Arabella Yount” could scarcely be said to box below their weight, either); but he lacks Dickens’s nervous reliance on the grotesque, not to mention his no-stone-unturned sense of place.

A more credible parallel is with Honoré de Balzac: like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people (though good people are in short supply in Capital); the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions (poor immigrants really do despise affluent white Londoners; some of our neighbours really do want to blow us up; we fall in love with our nannies not because they are younger and prettier than our wives but because they’re kinder-hearted and more companionable); and, crucially, the courage to bore his readers a little, at times, rather than leave them underinformed.

This is not, of course, the first large book to be so entitled. But Lanchester is not really doing “analysis” in the Marxist sense. The noises off we hear emanating from the world of money are not directly responsible for the bad things that happen to our characters; these are the result of personal wickedness, arcane coincidence, institutional stupidity (the book is at its most overtly political in its treatment of the post-9/11 criminal justice system and the immigration sector) or – realistically enough – dumb luck.

* Go to telegraph.co.uk/books to read an extract from Capital, and to watch an interview with the author, John Lanchester